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Personally, I think a like button adds very little value and is just something else spec has to worry with.
If I make some post and 20 people like it so what. If I make a post and no one likes it, so what.
Am I supposed to feel better or worse by it?
Are other people supposed to pay more attention to posts that are liked?
Can't people think for themselves?
Feel free to dislike this post. No need to push a button or reply if you do or don't. Easy peasy nice and easy.

It helps identify good answers to a question or post. As for it not working, I go on a few other forums for non laser related stuff, and it works very well.

We also have a like system on here already, it just involves people posting "+1 14 characters" or " I agree entirely" etc, which is far more of a pain and eats up storage as it increases the post count unnecessarily where a simple "like" vote would have added a few characters into an existing post.

From the sounds of it the biggest headache for admin on here is the gallery system which costs him a fortune in storage, bandwidth (every time someone views a post with a pic or uploads one), and a major headache with maintaining it. Yep it preserves images for ever, but at what cost? That's the real elephant in the room when there are hosts such as Imgbb to which you can upload pictures entirely for free and without an account.

Bingo. Yes, that was absolutely teasing. Hence the rolled eyes emoji. Truthfully when PL is down, it's a bit of a blessing to save me from myself and lurking in the buy sell thread. LOL

Updated your user title here, no charge breh.

Originally Posted by White-Light

Robert, if the gallery's a nightmare, why not do away with it entirely? That's 50GB of storage and a lot of bandwidth saved. Yep I know externally linked images sometimes expire and that can cause images to disappear over time. However, it's the system most boards use. Very few host locally anymore (presumably because of the costs).

Bandwidth is cheap all thing considered, storage(done right) and processor time is the killer. I was unbelievably processor constrained at the previous host. This is no longer an issue on this dedicated box as far as current usage/peak goes.

The gallery here is a little less that 5GB without all the overhead. The vbulletin attachments that have been uploaded to the board are pushing 50GB - I didn't get rid of the gallery because I feel that not losing data is important. While the gallery is gone, the lookup system in play now works to get access to the old content, even if it's not something that can be added to automatically. I feel I've done my job keeping the data alive and now accessible.

Originally Posted by White-Light

From the sounds of it the biggest headache for admin on here is the gallery system which costs him a fortune in storage, bandwidth (every time someone views a post with a pic or uploads one), and a major headache with maintaining it. Yep it preserves images for ever, but at what cost? That's the real elephant in the room when there are hosts such as Imgbb to which you can upload pictures entirely for free and without an account.

The only way the existing gallery will become expensive enough to warrant looking hard at it is if someone hotlinks the content to a very popular location. At that point I can just toss in a .htaccess file that will redirect every image they hotlink to some offensive hardcore porn.

Hotlinking is my primary concern with the FTP which is still in progress of getting spun back up here. That's 60GB by itself and can consume a non trivial amount of bandwidth. Doubly so if someone decides to test out their shiny gigabit connection against it.

So heres the issue now. I want r/w access for everyone that wants it. and read only for everyone else. The /symlink that displayed it in http here was... exploited. The problem I had in the past is that some "kind soul" decided to stuff it full of .htaccess files designed to stuff your cookies with their amazon affiliate code. Another one tried to remap system directories to public... which is another issue entirely.

Better solution: Single ftp account with write access given out to trusted people, public symlink access for everyone else.

Better-er solution: User accounts for ftp only with restrictive home directories and shred suspect files before merging the content on a timer to something like the old symlink. Anonymous logins for read access.

Better-er-est solution: Hook into vbulletin using the darkest of black magic to generate user accounts for the ftp as it's own isolated service. Users have a private directory that isn't shared and a shared public directory that will allow them to upload to a directly accessible location that everyone can see but only allow users to delete files they uploaded via access controls or other such voodoo.

I like the last one, so that's what I've been beating my head against the wall to do for the past few days.